I've heard a lot of good things about lasik, but one thing that concerns me personally is the fact that, AFAIK there aren't any studies on the long term effects (probably because it hasn't been around long enough).
Apparently some humans are marketable...just like that can of soup or bottle of shampoo. Maybe slavery was abolished because they realized that some people will sell themselves.
Yes, I know what was meant, but it still makes me shudder when people talk about "marketing" them selves...
For those of you who haven't read the article, I quote:
These warm-to-cold transitions happen in about 3 to 10 years. The cold periods lasted for 500 to 1,000 years. Such oscillations in temperature and ocean circulation have occurred on a regular basis.
and
Average winter temperatures could drop by 5 degrees Fahrenheit over much of the United States, and by 10 degrees in the northeastern United States and in Europe.
I wouldn't exactly say this is new though. My high school science teacher told us about this several years ago. And for those of you wondering, he's not denying global warming. Global warming is the increase of the earth's average termperature, which could cause average temperatures in certain areas to rise or fall more dramatically.
>Mind you this "pent up evoloution" really doesn't make sense for non-reducable systems: If evolution is trial and error, then how would evolution know what to queue up?
I believe this has something to do with punctuated equilibrium. I think the latest "trend" in evolutionary theory is that evolution isn't gradual, but occurs in what appears to be bursts. Such bursts are thought to occur as a result of dramatic changes in the environment. Perhaps drastic changes cause "pent up evoluiton" to break out for some members of the species, and survival of the fittest takes it from there. Anyway, that's how I would make sense of this, but I'm no scientist.
I'm not too sure about creationist claims that a "devine creator" makes more sense than evolutionary theory. It's like neural networks. You can describe how neural networks work, but when they do amazing things (like learn to fly) you really can't explain what the heck happened. That doesn't mean you just witnessed devine creation either...
>workers e-mail each other spoken messages, or videos of themselves delivering messages,
In other words, you'll get to hear other people's email too! Imagine actually being able to listen to other people's spam. Now that's what I call progress.
Seriously. There's a reason why people use email instead of voice mail. Microsoft must be getting really desperate if that's the best they can come up with.
As a Mac user, nothing annoys me more than UNIX style copy and paste. Consider the following example: I want to copy a sentence from one document and paste it over another sentence in another document. On a Mac, I select the part I want to copy, hit Apple-C, select the destination sentence, hit Apple-V. With UNIX style copy/paste, I have to delete the destination sentence first, then select the bit I want to copy, go back to the destination document and paste. By my books, that is NOT faster. And considering how I copy and paste over more than simply copy and paste, it ends up being much slower.
Don't you hate it when they write a bill that's severely detrimental to our rights and then call it "Patriot Act"? Who wants to be known as being "anti-Patriot Act" (well, I do, but I'm no politician). They should have a law saying that bills have to be named appropriately, like, in this case "One Step Closer to a Police State Act", "We Are Watching Your Reading Act", or "FBI Will Get You If You Read the Wrong Book Act". A shorter version might be "Screw Liberty Act".
I once wrote an online bookmark program but I don't use it any more. The couple dozen or so sites I go to often are stored in Brain 1.0, and when I come across a web page or site I want to keep for future reference, I email the URL to my self and put it in a particular IMAP mailbox. I can then look for it through my webmail interface (see sig) from anywhere in the world. If I type in a short description with the URL, I can even do a keyword search later on. I do the same with account passwords (although I simply memorize the really important ones -like sever logins). With an unlimited quota (and 20GB of free disk space on my server), I'll be able to store lots more info before I need to start putting stuff on other peoples machines (of all places).
Actually, it would be more like "people who don't like to pay for some stuff but might pay for other stuff." They might not pay to get wireless access in a small area, but they still very well may buy a cup of coffee or even lunch. If there was an incentive (like coupons only available to wireless users), they might be even more likely to spend money on local businesses.
>Practices like this have been common in other countries
When I lived in Germany in the 90s, I flew quite often inside of Europe (where security has always been tighter) and also to Japan and the US. I always carried a Swiss army knife, but they never confiscated it. One time, they made me take out a different larger knife, but instead of confiscating it, they put it in a special bag and checked it in as luggage.
In the last year, here in the US, I've had my nail clippers confiscated as well (I accidentally left them in my bag) costing me a couple of bucks for a replacement. Not to mention the few occasions when they took everything out of my bag and patted me down as if I were some criminal.
>There are more people willing to kill you just for being born where you born
Wrong. There are people willing to kill us, not because we were born where we were born, but because of the offensive nature of our culture and stupid foreign affairs policies our government has. They hate us for a reason. Without understanding that reason, there will be no solution, just more needless violence.
> US government is more interested in actual security
I guess it's never ocurred to you that people hate us because of the decisions our government made. We offended a group of people to the point to which some of them felt compelled to bomb us, and you call that actual security? Our government's trying to go to war despite international opposition and that makes you feel secure?
Well, I guess I do have a strange sense of security then.
It's kind of sad how NASA's running out of money when the military gets so much money. Personally, a government that can keep a space shuttle fleet up to date and flying would give me a better sense of security than a government that's eager to go to war. But maybe that's just me.
Staying on the ground is a lot more dangerous than flying in, say, commercial jets. In fact, whenever you fly anywhere, you're more likely to die driving to the airport than on the actual flight it self. In fact, I'm sure there are dozens of common activities that are more dangerous than flying in a helicopter in Alaska. (No, I don't work for an airline company, the FAA, or NTSB...just pointing out the statistics.)
I highly recommend mi for anyone who's looking for a text editor for coding purposes. It's got customizable syntax coloring, FTP (better than BBE's), integration with shell scripts, and all kinds of goodies. And it's free (as in beer).
What I don't understand is why Apple still gets chips from Motorolla when IBM appears to be a more agressive proponent of PowerPC (after all, they use it in some of the high-end machines). What does Apple get from Moto that they can't get from IBM?
>The only thing that has kept me from using OS X is the hardware issue. I intend to remedy that when my 4 year old x86 laptop, still going strong, dies on me. But I could be enjoying Mac OS X already if Apple would just see the light on this issue.
And that's exactly why Apple won't/shouldn't open the OS to other hardware platforms. If it came between you buying a copy of MacOS X now and buying an entire system later, they would obviously prefer you buy an entire system later (they make more money from hardware than software).
The argument that "Microsoft makes money from software" couldn't be a worse argument for why Apple should do the same. Having the same business plan as Microsoft in their monopolized market is more suicidal than shooting your self in the head (at least you have a chance of surviving a shot in the head).
If, as recent rumors suggest, Apple were to move to x86, it would be on proprietary Apple hardware. That's the only way they could possibly switch architectures and still survive as a company.
>there is no reward for contributing [...] lessening and lessening the amount of contributors.
Obvious you're not an open source developer (and probably shouldn't be if that's the way you think). Generally, I don't think Open Source developers look at "rewards" the way you (and most normal people) do.
I worked on my project for 2 years before I even released, and it's been as rewarding as any paid job I've had. My project just saw a large scale deployment, satisfying the company that deployed it as well as their users, which, in turn, has made the experience one of the most rewarding in my life.
To suggest that contributing to an open source project isn't rewarding is simply insulting to those of us who do feel rewarded.
> Start by defining the goals you have for the project
I would concur with that advice. Most people who submit patches understand how the Open Source model works, and they're usually not under the false impression that project admins have to incorporate all submissions. Also, if you explain why a particular patch or suggestion isn't going to be incorporated, the person submitting the patch/suggestion is less likely to take offence.
With my project (see shameless plug below), I was fortunate enough to have a fairly large company "sponsor" a feature for me. The difficult part, though, was to try and not be influenced by the "sponsor" too much. Even if you receive corporate backing of one sort or another, it's important to draw the line somewhere, and make sure they understand that they haven't bought you or your project. (In my case, the person I worked with on the other side clearly understood where we stood, so it was hardly ever a real concern.)
Another thing to remember is that people simply may not care enough to bother forking. I don't mean to be demeaning, but just want to point out the statistics. The fact of it is, most "Open Source" projects are written and maintained by a handful of people, with a slightly larger group of people testing (real testing, that is) and submitting patches. Although it may depend on the type of software, typical users aren't going to submit very many patches, or even feedback in general. For most projects, I'd say it's more likely for people to just stick with the project than to go through all the trouble of forking. But if they do fork, that's also not a bad thing (afterall, we're for competition aren't we?)
>The exact same things that make OS X as cool as it is on PPC hardware.
I don't think it's that simple. Even if Apple were to come out with an x86 version of MacOS X, none of the apps would work unless the vendors recompiled them for the new architecture.
Some people may think an x86 version of OS X would lead to more choices in hardware, but, the chances are, Apple would create proprietary hardware so that things will continue to Just Work(tm) the way they do now (and to stay alive).
So, really, I'm not sure what the real merits would be....
> I know ciphers are hard to break. But they are not impossible to break
While this is a valid point, I doubt it poses a plausible threat in this particular case, primarily because public key encryption is so widely used. If anyone wanted to spend enormous amounts of resources to crack such keys, the chances are, they won't be going after Apple's Software Update servers and it's relatively small number of clients.
The same has been seen with viruses. It's not necessary that viruses and worms are more difficult to write for Macs (although thay may be the case), but a simple matter of economics. Why write a virus that would, at most, infect 2-4% of the world's computers when, for the same (or less) effort, 90% of the world's computers can be targetted?
>When Apple can put out a G4 box [...]for under $1000 wo monitor, I'll switch
You can get an eMac for $1100 with monitor. Won't work if you specifically want a Mac without a monitor, but for a lot of people, it's probably a viable option.
Although I would agree that RTS's and sims aren't intellectually stimulating beyond a certain point, I think there is a point in saying "it depends."
The phrase "video games" is fairly broad and would include just about any game that is displayed on a video screen (or computer monitor), including such games as chess and go. I doubt anyone would be willing to say such games (as chess and go) decrease brain activity simply because of the way they are interfaced.
I can second this (although, I wouldn't say "everybody"). When I went to college in Japan, most other college students had between JPY40,000-120,000 in excess each month, often times given to them by their parents (college students are less independent there than they are in the US and elsewhere). It wasn't unusual for college students (or even high school students) to be spending over JPY10,000 just in cell phones. A night out with friends would typically cost at minimum JPY4000, plus, perhaps an additional JPY1000 just for transportation. Jobs generally paid well too, with McDonlads paying up to JPY1000/hour for late shifts.
The above only applies to college students and high school students, who, in more cases than not, still live with their parents or are dependent on them economically but can have fairly high-paying part time jobs. This changes a little when they become independent after college (shakai-jin, society person, is what they call it) when the cost of living catches up. But it still gives the economy an extremely wealthy youth market, that, IMO, helps drive the gadget market.
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I've heard a lot of good things about lasik, but one thing that concerns me personally is the fact that, AFAIK there aren't any studies on the long term effects (probably because it hasn't been around long enough).
How 'bout the compost? Stick crap in there and you get a heap of dirt! Um, well, may be not...
Apparently some humans are marketable...just like that can of soup or bottle of shampoo. Maybe slavery was abolished because they realized that some people will sell themselves.
Yes, I know what was meant, but it still makes me shudder when people talk about "marketing" them selves...
I wouldn't exactly say this is new though. My high school science teacher told us about this several years ago. And for those of you wondering, he's not denying global warming. Global warming is the increase of the earth's average termperature, which could cause average temperatures in certain areas to rise or fall more dramatically.
I believe this has something to do with punctuated equilibrium. I think the latest "trend" in evolutionary theory is that evolution isn't gradual, but occurs in what appears to be bursts. Such bursts are thought to occur as a result of dramatic changes in the environment. Perhaps drastic changes cause "pent up evoluiton" to break out for some members of the species, and survival of the fittest takes it from there. Anyway, that's how I would make sense of this, but I'm no scientist.
I'm not too sure about creationist claims that a "devine creator" makes more sense than evolutionary theory. It's like neural networks. You can describe how neural networks work, but when they do amazing things (like learn to fly) you really can't explain what the heck happened. That doesn't mean you just witnessed devine creation either...
>workers e-mail each other spoken messages, or videos of themselves delivering messages,
In other words, you'll get to hear other people's email too! Imagine actually being able to listen to other people's spam. Now that's what I call progress.
Seriously. There's a reason why people use email instead of voice mail. Microsoft must be getting really desperate if that's the best they can come up with.
As a Mac user, nothing annoys me more than UNIX style copy and paste. Consider the following example: I want to copy a sentence from one document and paste it over another sentence in another document. On a Mac, I select the part I want to copy, hit Apple-C, select the destination sentence, hit Apple-V. With UNIX style copy/paste, I have to delete the destination sentence first, then select the bit I want to copy, go back to the destination document and paste. By my books, that is NOT faster. And considering how I copy and paste over more than simply copy and paste, it ends up being much slower.
The fact that embryos are often simply thrown away is a very important fact that's not raised often enough.
Somebody please mod parent up.
Don't you hate it when they write a bill that's severely detrimental to our rights and then call it "Patriot Act"? Who wants to be known as being "anti-Patriot Act" (well, I do, but I'm no politician). They should have a law saying that bills have to be named appropriately, like, in this case "One Step Closer to a Police State Act", "We Are Watching Your Reading Act", or "FBI Will Get You If You Read the Wrong Book Act". A shorter version might be "Screw Liberty Act".
I once wrote an online bookmark program but I don't use it any more. The couple dozen or so sites I go to often are stored in Brain 1.0, and when I come across a web page or site I want to keep for future reference, I email the URL to my self and put it in a particular IMAP mailbox. I can then look for it through my webmail interface (see sig) from anywhere in the world. If I type in a short description with the URL, I can even do a keyword search later on. I do the same with account passwords (although I simply memorize the really important ones -like sever logins). With an unlimited quota (and 20GB of free disk space on my server), I'll be able to store lots more info before I need to start putting stuff on other peoples machines (of all places).
Actually, it would be more like "people who don't like to pay for some stuff but might pay for other stuff." They might not pay to get wireless access in a small area, but they still very well may buy a cup of coffee or even lunch. If there was an incentive (like coupons only available to wireless users), they might be even more likely to spend money on local businesses.
When I lived in Germany in the 90s, I flew quite often inside of Europe (where security has always been tighter) and also to Japan and the US. I always carried a Swiss army knife, but they never confiscated it. One time, they made me take out a different larger knife, but instead of confiscating it, they put it in a special bag and checked it in as luggage.
In the last year, here in the US, I've had my nail clippers confiscated as well (I accidentally left them in my bag) costing me a couple of bucks for a replacement. Not to mention the few occasions when they took everything out of my bag and patted me down as if I were some criminal.
>There are more people willing to kill you just for being born where you born
Wrong. There are people willing to kill us, not because we were born where we were born, but because of the offensive nature of our culture and stupid foreign affairs policies our government has. They hate us for a reason. Without understanding that reason, there will be no solution, just more needless violence.
I guess it's never ocurred to you that people hate us because of the decisions our government made. We offended a group of people to the point to which some of them felt compelled to bomb us, and you call that actual security? Our government's trying to go to war despite international opposition and that makes you feel secure?
Well, I guess I do have a strange sense of security then.
It's kind of sad how NASA's running out of money when the military gets so much money. Personally, a government that can keep a space shuttle fleet up to date and flying would give me a better sense of security than a government that's eager to go to war. But maybe that's just me.
Staying on the ground is a lot more dangerous than flying in, say, commercial jets. In fact, whenever you fly anywhere, you're more likely to die driving to the airport than on the actual flight it self. In fact, I'm sure there are dozens of common activities that are more dangerous than flying in a helicopter in Alaska. (No, I don't work for an airline company, the FAA, or NTSB...just pointing out the statistics.)
I highly recommend mi for anyone who's looking for a text editor for coding purposes. It's got customizable syntax coloring, FTP (better than BBE's), integration with shell scripts, and all kinds of goodies. And it's free (as in beer).
What I don't understand is why Apple still gets chips from Motorolla when IBM appears to be a more agressive proponent of PowerPC (after all, they use it in some of the high-end machines). What does Apple get from Moto that they can't get from IBM?
And that's exactly why Apple won't/shouldn't open the OS to other hardware platforms. If it came between you buying a copy of MacOS X now and buying an entire system later, they would obviously prefer you buy an entire system later (they make more money from hardware than software).
The argument that "Microsoft makes money from software" couldn't be a worse argument for why Apple should do the same. Having the same business plan as Microsoft in their monopolized market is more suicidal than shooting your self in the head (at least you have a chance of surviving a shot in the head).
If, as recent rumors suggest, Apple were to move to x86, it would be on proprietary Apple hardware. That's the only way they could possibly switch architectures and still survive as a company.
Obvious you're not an open source developer (and probably shouldn't be if that's the way you think). Generally, I don't think Open Source developers look at "rewards" the way you (and most normal people) do.
I worked on my project for 2 years before I even released, and it's been as rewarding as any paid job I've had. My project just saw a large scale deployment, satisfying the company that deployed it as well as their users, which, in turn, has made the experience one of the most rewarding in my life.
To suggest that contributing to an open source project isn't rewarding is simply insulting to those of us who do feel rewarded.
I would concur with that advice. Most people who submit patches understand how the Open Source model works, and they're usually not under the false impression that project admins have to incorporate all submissions. Also, if you explain why a particular patch or suggestion isn't going to be incorporated, the person submitting the patch/suggestion is less likely to take offence.
With my project (see shameless plug below), I was fortunate enough to have a fairly large company "sponsor" a feature for me. The difficult part, though, was to try and not be influenced by the "sponsor" too much. Even if you receive corporate backing of one sort or another, it's important to draw the line somewhere, and make sure they understand that they haven't bought you or your project. (In my case, the person I worked with on the other side clearly understood where we stood, so it was hardly ever a real concern.)
Another thing to remember is that people simply may not care enough to bother forking. I don't mean to be demeaning, but just want to point out the statistics. The fact of it is, most "Open Source" projects are written and maintained by a handful of people, with a slightly larger group of people testing (real testing, that is) and submitting patches. Although it may depend on the type of software, typical users aren't going to submit very many patches, or even feedback in general. For most projects, I'd say it's more likely for people to just stick with the project than to go through all the trouble of forking. But if they do fork, that's also not a bad thing (afterall, we're for competition aren't we?)
>The exact same things that make OS X as cool as it is on PPC hardware.
I don't think it's that simple. Even if Apple were to come out with an x86 version of MacOS X, none of the apps would work unless the vendors recompiled them for the new architecture.
Some people may think an x86 version of OS X would lead to more choices in hardware, but, the chances are, Apple would create proprietary hardware so that things will continue to Just Work(tm) the way they do now (and to stay alive).
So, really, I'm not sure what the real merits would be....
While this is a valid point, I doubt it poses a plausible threat in this particular case, primarily because public key encryption is so widely used. If anyone wanted to spend enormous amounts of resources to crack such keys, the chances are, they won't be going after Apple's Software Update servers and it's relatively small number of clients.
The same has been seen with viruses. It's not necessary that viruses and worms are more difficult to write for Macs (although thay may be the case), but a simple matter of economics. Why write a virus that would, at most, infect 2-4% of the world's computers when, for the same (or less) effort, 90% of the world's computers can be targetted?
You can get an eMac for $1100 with monitor. Won't work if you specifically want a Mac without a monitor, but for a lot of people, it's probably a viable option.
Although I would agree that RTS's and sims aren't intellectually stimulating beyond a certain point, I think there is a point in saying "it depends."
The phrase "video games" is fairly broad and would include just about any game that is displayed on a video screen (or computer monitor), including such games as chess and go. I doubt anyone would be willing to say such games (as chess and go) decrease brain activity simply because of the way they are interfaced.
I can second this (although, I wouldn't say "everybody"). When I went to college in Japan, most other college students had between JPY40,000-120,000 in excess each month, often times given to them by their parents (college students are less independent there than they are in the US and elsewhere). It wasn't unusual for college students (or even high school students) to be spending over JPY10,000 just in cell phones. A night out with friends would typically cost at minimum JPY4000, plus, perhaps an additional JPY1000 just for transportation. Jobs generally paid well too, with McDonlads paying up to JPY1000/hour for late shifts.
The above only applies to college students and high school students, who, in more cases than not, still live with their parents or are dependent on them economically but can have fairly high-paying part time jobs. This changes a little when they become independent after college (shakai-jin, society person, is what they call it) when the cost of living catches up. But it still gives the economy an extremely wealthy youth market, that, IMO, helps drive the gadget market.
BTW, when I was there JPY120 ~= USD1.00